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Drug shortage)
       
352:MM

-3-

"The anti-epidemic service of the Chinese Government is exceptionally well organized and the two large laboratories in Kunming and Lanchow are able to produce sufficient quantities of many kinds of vaccine and serum to prevent or combat not only plague but almost any epidemic disease.

"The solution of its third and probably greatest problem is beyond the scope of the National Health Administration.  It is malnutrition, an evil as old as Chinese history, but recently aggravated on account of the war and its economic consequences.  The main sufferers, however, are no more the farmers whose crops were more or less normal in recent years but the soldiers, government officials, teachers, salaried employees, large groups of coolies and industrial workers and numerous small shop keepers.

"Although none of them actually go hungry, their diet is qualitatively deficient, consisting as it does mainly of rice and small quantities of vegetables. Allowances for the soldiers and their own wages, salaries of government officials and employees, labor wages and the incomes of small trades people are all lagging behind the continuous drastic rise of prices so that their standard of living ahs become more and more depressed. 

Medical experts state that many of the disease they have to treat, especially tuberculosis, are largely brought about by lowered physical resistance due to malnutrition while the treatment of hospital cases is made extremely difficult on the account of the qualitatively insufficient diet given to the sick.

"The fresh rise of prices which was expected after the Chinese New Year (February 15th) has materialized. Prices have been going up steadily since that date because producers, landlords, and merchants, having sold whatever the had to sell in order to get cash for the normal debt settlement, are once more withholding their goods for speculative motives. The issue of price control is again in the foreground of political discussion and the government is again asked even by such liberal newspapers as the Ta Kung Pao to take the most drastic measures of sever punishment against irresponsible hoarders and speculators who are undermining the health or the nation and its fighting power.

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